By creating and publishing versioned specifications and product offerings in a technical product catalog, your customers can order up-to-date versions of the products or services that they require. Your product catalog manager
can create versions of the published specifications and product offerings with the required enhancements to support your customer's business, marketing, manufacturing, or operational
changes.
Overview of product offerings with specifications
As a product catalog manager, you set up product offerings in a technical product catalog. A product offering contains the product description, pricing, eligibility, and product options. You use a product catalog to group your
product offerings so that your customers can order the products or services that they want. Only published product offerings can be added to customer contracts.
The relationship between product offerings and the product, service, and resource specification determine how a product is fulfilled. For example, the following diagram shows the relationships between the product offerings, the
product specification, the service specification, and the resource specification for an SD-WAN product model.
Figura 1. SD-WAN product model
Each product offering has the following components:
Product specification
A product specification defines the various aspects of a product including the following:
All the specification characteristic options that are available for a product, and how they should be fulfilled.
Various categories of information, such as the brand, cost, terms and conditions, and product-related materials, which include product visuals. Product specifications are customer-facing and are added to product
offerings.
Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications, and how a customer order of a product offering is delivered.
A service specification defines a service, and the technical information of that service, including the following:
All the specification characteristic options that are available for a service, and how they should be fulfilled.
Various categories of information, including the cost, terms and conditions, and service-related materials. These resources include the service-related visuals and implementation guides. Service specifications
can be customer-facing or resource-facing.
Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications.
A resource specification defines the technical information for a resource, including the following:
All the specification characteristic options that are available for a resource, and how they should be fulfilled.
Various categories of information, such as the manufacture, model, and brand-related information about a resource, including the resource visuals and activation guides. Resource specifications are not
customer-facing.
Its relationship to other product, service, and resource specifications. You can enable the product and service delivery by using the required resource.
The following example shows a managed firewall service structure that incorporates service and resource specifications.
Figura 2. Managed firewall service structure
Setting up your initial specifications and product offerings
The following diagram and summary shows an example sequence that you can use to set up technical product offerings, such as telecommunications products for your customers.Figura 3. Configure technical
product offerings
Create product, service, and resource specification categories that you associate with model categories to determine the product model and fulfillment workflow of a technical product offering for your
customer.
Create and publish the initial base version of a resource specification to define all the resource options for a customer-facing product that you sell and to designate how to fulfill these options.
Create and publish the initial base version of a service specification. A service specification defines all the service options that apply to a customer-facing product you sell, and designates how to fulfill
these options.
Create and publish the initial base version of a product specification. A product specification defines all the product options that apply to a customer-facing product you sell, and designates how to fulfill
these options. It contains information such as the product description, pricing, eligibility, and product options.
Create the specification relationships and optional decomposition rules that define the associations between the product, service, and resource specifications for a product offering. These relationships control
how an order is fulfilled for a customer.
Define attribute-mapping rules between two specifications in the product catalog so that fulfillment agents can access all relevant characteristic values in your product, service, and resource orders.
Create and publish the initial base versions of your product, service, or resource specifications. For each specification, create the specification relationships, decomposition rules, and attribute mappings. To learn more, see:
Creating versions of specifications and product offerings
You can create and publish versioned specifications and product offerings so that your customers can order the most up-to-date versions of your product and service offerings. To learn more, see:
The following process
describes the steps for creating a version of a
specification or a product offering:
Create and assign a new version number in each of the product, service, resource specifications, or product offerings that are affected by the changes. To learn more, see Create and publish resource specifications.
For each specification in the new version, create the required specification relationships, decomposition rules, and attribute mappings. To learn more, see:
You can't use versioned or non-versioned catalog entities, such as specifications and product offerings, in ordering, inventory, or for other purposes when they are in a Draft state. For example, you can't
select and use a product offering in Order Capture if it is still in a Draft state.
